1.10.2013

Modern companies thrive by harnessing and interpreting data. The more data we have, and the more we focus on analyzing it, the better we can make decisions. Data about our customers, data about purchasing patterns, data about network throughput, data in server logs, data in sales receipts. When we crunch our internal data, and cross-reference it against external data sources, we get goodness. That’s what Big Data is all about.

Data crunching and data correlation isn’t new, of course. That’s what business intelligence is all about. Spotting trends and making predictions is what business analysts have been doing for 40 years or more. From weather forecasters to the World Bank, from particle physicists to political pollsters, all that’s new is that our technology has gotten better. Our hardware, our software and our algorithms are a lot better.

Admittedly, some political pollsters in the recent United States presidential election didn’t seem to have better data analytics. That’s another story for another day.

Yes, “Big Data” is a fairly generic phrase, and our focus should rightfully be on benefits, not on the 1s and 0s themselves. However, the phrase neatly fronts a broad concept that plenty of people seem to understand very well, thank you very much. Language is a tool; if the phrase Big Data gets the job done, we’ll stick with it, both as a term to use in SD Times and as the name of our technical training conference focused on data acquisition, predictive analytics, etc., Big Data TechCon.

The name doesn’t matter. Big Data. Business Intelligence. Predictive Analytics. Decision Support. Whatever. What matters is that we’re doing it.

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About Me

Co-founder and editorial director of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times, the leading magazine for the software development industry.
Founder of SPTechCon: The SharePoint Technology Conference, AnDevCon: The Android Developer Conference, and Big Data TechCon.
Also president and principal analyst of Camden Associates, an IT consulting and analyst firm.